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Older than the dinosaurs: Lamprey fish return to UK rivers after 200 years
Ancient eel-like fish is reclaiming its former river strongholds as water quailty improves
An ancient fish blamed for the death of a king and served as a traditional royal dish is returning to parts of Britain where it has been absent for 200 years.
Lampreys, a Medieval delicacy and eaten in a scene of Games of Thrones, evolved almost 200m years before the dinosaurs but industrial pollution drove them out of many of Britain’s rivers.
Continue reading...The shrinking glaciers of Austria
The thawing of Dachstein Massif show how climate change is precipitating the melting of glaciers, reports Der Standard
The view is breathtaking. Sheer cliff faces extend beneath the gondola as it glides from the Styrian town of Ramsau to the southern part of the Dachstein Massif, home to three glaciers.
Upon arrival, visitors to the mountain are greeted by a green model dinosaur. The figure is meant to amuse children, but it has taken on a symbolic role too: glaciers belong to a dying breed. All three of the Dachstein’s glaciers – the Gosau, the Hallstätter and the Schladminger – have shrunk this year.
Threatened ecological community listed under the EPBC Act
Leadbeater’s possum Action Plan
India: No country for wild tigers? | Janaki Lenin
Authorities seek to widen a road that would cut wildlife corridors and put the future sustainability of three tiger reserves at risk
If the tigers of Panna are under threat of being displaced by a dam, the tigers of nearby Kanha, Pench, and Navegaon Nagzira tiger reserves in the two central Indian states of Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra are in danger from a highway.
The National Highways Authority of India proposes to widen a 50-km (31-mile) stretch of road to a four-lane divided highway connecting Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh, with Nagpur, Maharashtra. While allowing humans to hurtle between these two cities, the road slices two tiger corridors: Pench-Nagzira corridor in Maharashtra and the Pench-Kanha corridor in Madhya Pradesh. Although National Highway 7 (NH7) exists already, widening it will aggravate the problem it poses to wildlife. Central Indian forests hold about 33% of India’s tigers, 688 of them.
Continue reading...Australian export from New and Exploratory Fisheries in the CCAMLR Statistical Divisions 58.4.1 and 58.4.2
Brompton: bicycle review | Emma John
People love Bromptons: not just suited commuters but maître d’s and cinema ushers. What’s the big deal?
Brompton M3L
Price £905
Weight 11.8kg
I count myself a functional cyclist: I don’t cycle for exercise, because I enjoy a sense of speed or to justify a wardrobe full of steampunk chic. I cycle because I am lazy and pedalling feels like less effort than walking. My journey into work only takes a quarter of an hour by bike, allowing me 15 minutes longer in bed. But when cycling seems like an effort, I simply won’t do it. Anything beyond a 25-minute radius of my house and I reach for the tube app.
Continue reading...Journey through the Northwest Passage – in pictures
The best shots from Robin McKie’s journey through the north-west passage. Read the full account here
Queensland East Coast Inshore Fin Fish Fishery
Graeme Hopkins - Living Architecture
AdelaideSBN Spotlight - August 2015
Connecting with Nature
Presenter: Graeme Hopkins
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Graeme Hopkins is a Registered Landscape Architect, Registered Architect and Research Fellow in the Zero Waste Centre for Sustainable Design & Behaviour at the University of South Australia. He is principal of Fifth Creek Studio, and since the 1980s he has developed expertise in WSUD design and implementation, and the use of landscape strategies and natural systems within urban environments to provide climate change adaptation, with a particular focus on micro climate modification through the use of living architecture technologies such as green roofs and walls. He received a Churchill Fellowship in 2005 to study green roofs and walls overseas.
His book Living Architecture: Green roofs and walls (co-authored with Christine Goodwin) was published by CSIRO Publishing in mid-2011. Fifth Creek Studio was awarded the AILA South Australia Medal for Landscape Architecture 2012-13 for the book. He is currently conducting research into the heat impact of various landscape materials for landscape on structure and its effect on micro climate for North Sydney Council. Previously he completed three research and monitoring projects funded jointly by the South Australian government and Aspen Development: a living wall feasibility study for Adelaide’s climate, an innovative hybrid living wall system designed by Fifth Creek Studio and Woods Bagot for multi-storey buildings; and green roof trials to enable the development of an insulation performance tool for particular use in hot dry climates. This suite of projects won the 2013 AILA SA and the 2014 National AILA Excellence Awards in the category of Research and Communications in Landscape Architecture.
Cast: AdelaideSBN and ESM
Janelle Arbon - Connecting with Nature
AdelaideSBN Spotlight - August 2015
Connecting with Nature
Janelle Arbon | Design Consultant for the Adelaide City Council | Treasurer of the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects (AILA)
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Janelle Arbon is a registered landscape architect, AILA SA Chapter Treasurer and PhD Candidate. She has been a team member of Adelaide City Council program City Design and Transport Strategy since 2012 leading and delivering key council projects including the Princess Elizabeth Playspace and promoting design-led thinking across many of the city’s projects, including projects by the State Government. Previously Janelle was a Senior Landscape Architect at Swanbury Penglase. During the 6 1/2 years she had the opportunity to work on many varied projects across different platforms; everything educational facilities to recreation strategies. The diversity resulted in numerous state awards for projects including M2 and the Plasso UniSA Campus at Mawson Lakes.
She has been an active AILA SA Chapter executive member since 2009 and is currently the chapter treasurer. She has been involved in and is involved in AILA registration, mentoring, social media administration, education and awards as well as numerous sub committees. Janelle values continual professional development and research in design. She is currently undertaking a PhD at the School of Built Environment and Architecture, University of Adelaide. The thesis titled The Invisible Privatization of Public Space: Implications for the Landscape Architect questions how we can protect against privatisation of public space and what role do designers play within agencies driven by market privatisation and economic rationalism.
Cast: AdelaideSBN and ESM
Why I ate a roadkill squirrel
If grey squirrels killed every year in the UK were sold for meat, it would be no bad thing. Factory farming is more harmful to the environment
The first hour of the day, before the sun is over the horizon: this is the time to see wildlife. In the spring and summer, when no one else is walking, when there is no traffic and the air is dense, so that the sounds of the natural world reverberate, when nocturnal and diurnal beasts are roaming, you will see animals that melt away like snow as the sun rises.
Whenever I stay in an unfamiliar part of the countryside, I try to wake before dawn and walk until the heat begins to rise. Many of my richest experiences with wildlife have occurred at such times. In this magical hour, I too seem to come to life. I hear more, smell more, I am more alert. I feel that at other times my perceptions are muted, my senses dulled by the white noise of the day.
Queensland Schulz Fisheries Pty Ltd
SENG National Newsletter - August 2015
Here’s what happens when you try to replicate climate contrarian papers | Dana Nuccitelli
A new paper finds common errors among the 3% of climate papers that reject the global warming consensus
Those who reject the 97% expert consensus on human-caused global warming often invoke Galileo as an example of when the scientific minority overturned the majority view. In reality, climate contrarians have almost nothing in common with Galileo, whose conclusions were based on empirical scientific evidence, supported by many scientific contemporaries, and persecuted by the religious-political establishment. Nevertheless, there’s a slim chance that the 2–3% minority is correct and the 97% climate consensus is wrong.
To evaluate that possibility, a new paper published in the journal of Theoretical and Applied Climatology examines a selection of contrarian climate science research and attempts to replicate their results. The idea is that accurate scientific research should be replicable, and through replication we can also identify any methodological flaws in that research. The study also seeks to answer the question, why do these contrarian papers come to a different conclusion than 97% of the climate science literature?
SENG Newsletter No.53 - Earth overshoot day and much more
Sea Shepherd anti-whaling ship Bob Barker refused entry to Faroe Islands
Territory says it banned activist group’s entry after it had ‘deliberately attempted to disrupt the legal and regulated activity of driving and killing pilot whales’
Denmark’s autonomous Faroe Islands announced on Monday that they had refused entry to a ship carrying 21 activists from the militant conservation group Sea Shepherd who were trying to disrupt traditional whale hunts.
The territory’s government said in a statement that it had barred the ship, the Bob Barker, “with a basis in immigration legislation and in the interests of maintaining law and order”.
Continue reading...Specieswatch: Wild boar
Wild boar (Sus scrofa) have been quietly re-establishing themselves in the woodlands of Britain for a couple of decades, although that statement might be challenged by those who have had their gardens dug up or crops eaten.
Related: Here comes trouble: the return of the wild boar to Britain
Continue reading...Indigenous tribe opposes hydropower projects in Tawang | Janaki Lenin
An indigenous tribe of Arunachal Pradesh, the Monpa, fears its religious and cultural sites will be affected by 15 hydroelectric projects
On 24 and 25 August, the Expert Appraisal Committee on River Valley and Hydroelectric Projects of the Ministry of Environment and Forests is scheduled to discuss the impact of 15 hydroelectric projects planned for the Tawang river basin in western Arunachal Pradesh. In an area wedged between China and Bhutan, these dams, with a combined capacity of about 2800MW of power, will submerge 249 hectares (615 acres) of forest. Other construction work such as roads will affect an even larger area of forest.
The Buddhist Monpa tribe, which lives in Tawang, fears its sacred sites, monasteries, and springs will be affected by the various components of these hydel projects. Villagers organised a huge rally from Tawang monastery to protest the construction of hydroelectric projects, defying a ban on public gathering in December 2012.
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